3 ms·

I'm sure there are a lot of programmers who don't know this is happening, or if they have noticed, they don't know it's "smart punctuation" so don't know what s

I'm sure there are a lot of programmers who don't know this is happening, or if they have noticed, they don't know it's "smart punctuation" so don't know what setting to click. Computers need a sort of general 'debugger', you should be able to click on something and ask the computer why it did that, or what is this (a bit like web pages have 'inspect') ... so you could click on the unicode quote and ask "What is this? Why is it here? How do I change it?"

Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
> a lot of programmers who don't know this is happening Not so sure - anyone who’s ever copied and pasted from an arbitrary WordPress blog that adds smart quotes to code snippets, for example, will have encountered this.
inetknght 9y ago
This, a thousand fold. I would point out that it's often an inherent problem in many GUIs though. TUIs are (usually) a bit more explicit about what you tell it to do (even if it's still sometimes rather dumb in doing it. (cue yesterday's article about command line interfaces and reification, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619796 )